Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie

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9/11 did a lot towards making the mere mention of terrorists in fiction an incredibly risky gambit in the eyes of Hollywood. Many executives even went so far as to remove the World Trade Center from their movies to avoid offending or saddening people in the years afterwards, for fear of it being Too Soon.

For Films and Live-Action TV series, the time after September Eleventh can be classified into three periods:

The First: Where a great, great many movies after 9/11 don't talk about it, mention it, or even imply it happened, stories set in the US, especially New York, after the attacks that should logically deal with terrorism never even talk about it passingly.

In The Second, as these fears subsided, writers and directors would dare to be brave and artsy by using incrementally larger references and even plots related to terrorism.

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Until eventually The Third brought the opposite reaction to the first: movies that go overboard in dealing exclusively with terrorism.

These movies (though Live-Action TV deals with this too) tend to fall flat for several reasons. In the First, because of the total absence of what should be logically there (lame excuses add to this). The second tend to be too self-congratulatory for the relatively minor mention; leading into the third turning Anvilicious in their focus on terrorism.

Another aspect is that the armed forces tend to be given one of three treatments: puppy-kicking monsters, a helpless Red Shirt Army, or a near Mary Sue competence boost. This last usually happens in action movies that want to kick terrorist tail. This (for international viewers anyway) tends to have a bit too much America Saves the Day, considering the war is ongoing.

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Interestingly, shows that dealt with terrorism before 9/11 tend to fare better than those made after, albeit they reacted in different ways.

Examples:

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Anime

Full Metal Panic!, which despite being set in an alternate history where the USSR never fell and terrorism is of the good old fashioned state sponsored kind, got the Type One treatment, with it's US premiere postponed for about a year following 9/11, just because it's fourth episode featured a plane being hijacked, despite the fact that, the plane then landed safely and all it's teenage passengers where rescued by Mithril. So except the actual act of hijacking an airplane there was ZERO parallel with 9/11.

More awkward is that a critical part of Sousuke's backstory being a Child Soldier in the Mujahideen, the broad anti-Communist insurgency movement during the Soviet-Afghan war that al-Qaeda branched off from. Not wanting to suggest that the series' hero was once fighting on the same side as Osama bin Ladennote though this wouldn't be true, as Osama was booted out by the time Sousuke would have gotten involved, and the specific commander Sousuke fought under is an Expy of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a political enemy of Osama's whom al-Qaeda would eventually assassinate, the 2002 anime adaptation opts to change Sousuke's stated home country from Afghanistan to the fictional "Helmajistan," refrain from naming the guerilla force he was part of, and remove any references to the fact that he was raised Muslim.

In Eden of the East, Mononobe's plans involve what's basically a copy cat crime version of 9/11. He noticed how those attacks brought people together in America, and so wants to recreate that effect via a False Flag Operation which involves firing missiles at Japan and killing thousands of people. Oddly, the hero doesn't find the False Flag Operation part an intrinsically bad idea—he just wants to create the same effect but without having to kill anyone.

The Punisher MAX: While Frank never directly fights any terrorists, terrorism influences several arcs:

The very first arc has a corrupt CIA agent try to hire Frank to do the Agency's dirty work. Frank's objections are along the lines that they get their funding from heroin (plus, y'know, he's already had experience with doing CIA wetwork in Vietnam).

"Mother Russia": Several American generals have been secretly funding their own terrorist cell to carry out deniable attacks on other countries. They end up using it on Russia (the plane gets shot down) to cause a distraction from Frank stealing a bioweapon.

"Up Is Down And Black Is White": An ambitious Mafia goon thinks up a plan to deal with Frank once and for all: piss him off into Unstoppable Rage so he'll make mistakes and be easier to kill (and does this by sending the video of him defiling the Castle family graves to every news station). When Frank responds by hitting every criminal organization he knows of, City Hall holds an emergency meeting to discuss what to do with the mayor specifically saying he does not want to see the word "terrorism" associated with the case.

"Man of Stone": Frank is lured to Afghanistan to confront the general from the previous arc (who'd seen through the "terrorists" plot and was Reassigned to Antarctica for it). While he does kill islamists, it's only to avenge O'Brien's gangrape at their hands (her CIA ex-husband had thrown her to them when he'd ripped off the Taliban on a heroin deal).

Nick Fury regularly appears to make parallels with the US' other lost war, since both he and Frank are a product of it.

The Boys: Set in an Alternate Universe where superpowered individuals have existed since WW2, but are mostly Vought Corporation-sponsored hedonists. While 9/11 did happen, the President (not Bush, he'd managed to decapitate himself with a chainsaw) had listened to the warnings and ordered the planes to be shot down, but the Vought-planted VP knocked him out so the supers could save the day. The supers royally screwed up the rescue attempt, with the net result being that the planes plowed into the Brooklyn Bridge rather than the WTC. Some of the more controversial aspects of The War on Terror still occur (the main characters work for the CIA), but most of the plots involve preventing Vought from mass-marketing supers.

The first film averted all mention of the war on terror. Even the army base in Qatar attacked in the beginning, though in the Middle East, has been there for decades. Notably, the US military is capable of helping the Autobots on occasion, and even fighting off Scorponok. However, no one ever mentions the possibility of a terrorist attack, even with the hacking attacks it's assumed to be the work of Iran, North Korea, or China.

This may actually be a case of Reality Is Unrealistic since the ability to take out a US military base with almost no survivors left is something that no terrorist group is even close to doing. Even the hacking as portrayed in the movie is beyond the abilities of any terrorist groups. US military networks are very hard to breach even less so with someone doing it from inside Air Force One.

In the second film they portrayed American-led special forces hunting Decepticons around the world with carte blanche international support.

By the third film this had changed completely. The Decepticons are portrayed as terrorists that execute a 9/11-style event on a citywide scale in Chicago. The filmmakers evoke 9/11 imagery throughout the entire scene by setting buildings on fire, knocking them over and showing human beings jumping from them. What happens if Americans make concessions to terrorists makes up a large portion of the plot.

The Kingdom likewise gives the dispatched US agents the military might of an entire platoon to kill an entire terrorist cell in their fortified barrio. Interestingly, it does otherwise deal with the issue more realistically than other films, dealing with the politics and culture involved and even how both sides can get fanatical, including a rather chilling future Tyke Bomb in the making.

The original draft of the script had a different ending in which all of the U.S. agents were killed by the other Saudi liaison as the Americans boarded the plane at the end. It was agreed that the audience just wouldn't be able to walk away from the movie after seeing that, and rightfully so.

The one-of-a-kind multimedia montage is one of the most concise and accurate film representations of the events that lead up to 9/11, it should be used in history classes.

Strangely yet unsurprisingly, the real life Saudis claimed the movie as racist and stereotyping against them, in spite of some of the more positive imagery that the movie gives their perspective.

Spike Lee's 25th Hour was at the time amazingly risqué for showing five minutes worth of a character's first hand view of ground zero being cleaned up. To be fair, considering the rest of the movie's downer tone, it was used devastatingly well.

Munich, which dealt with the aftermath of the 1972 terrorist attacks during the Olympics, took place long before 9-11 and hence avoided mentioning it specifically... though the last shot of the film is of the Twin Towers in New York City. Judge for yourself.

Reign Over Me, a melodrama with Adam Sandler as a 9/11 widower and Don Cheadle as a friend attempting to help him recuperate, exemplifies the second type, while not actually being about terrorism per se.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan dealt directly with the terrorism involved in the Israeli-Arab conflict mostly in the third way: the main character was a counter-terror operative. In a rather surprising fact for an Adam Sandler film, both sides are treated as sympathetic people who want to just get on with their lives but have to fight a ridiculous war to please annoying, nationalist parents. This isn't entirely true, but it's damn good for a film that otherwise focused on Sandler finding new ways to talk about sex with a funny accent.

In Spielberg's War of the Worlds, Dakota Fanning asks "is it the terrorists?" when the aliens start attacking. The film is full of imagery that evokes the attacks as well: aliens fire heat rays that turn people into clouds of ash, and in one scene the aftermath of a plane crash is studied. Also notable is the attitude of the protagonist's son, who is obsessed with "getting back at them."

Then there are the movies actually about the 9/11 attacks:

United 93, which ironically somewhat subverts the trope by being a Verité-style docudrama.

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, which tells the true story of two Port Authority police officers who were trapped under the rubble for 24 hours.

2017's 9/11, starring Charlie Sheen and Whoopi Goldberg, depicts the story of a small group trapped in an elevator during the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Right at Your Door, which was about a biological attack on Los Angeles. Ignored the actual terrorists completely, focusing solely on the effect this would have on average people.

In Iron Man much of the plot takes place in Afghanistan, but the Ten Rings aren't Islamist terrorists.

On the other hand, the fact that the Ten Rings aren't jihadists isn't made apparent to the viewer until later in the film, when the video of Tony being held captive is given in-universe subtitles, which seems to be deliberate.

The Robert Pattinson film Remember Me. The very last shot of the movie, shows a classroom with the date of September 11, 2001, then Pattinson's character in his office in the World Trade Center. Audiences and critics alike did not take this well.

Casino Royale (2006): M says that the CIA discovered a massive shorting of airline stocks that allowed "somebody" to profit from 9/11. While it's never stated outright that Le Chiffre was involved in 9/11, it's at least heavily implied: he tries to pull the same scam in the movie, and as a banker for terrorists it stands to reason that he'd have the connections to know 9/11 was coming. M's offhand comment "Christ, I miss the Cold War", besides being a Continuity Nod to older Bond movies, is likely an allusion to the post-9/11 state of politics.

The Thai superhero film Mercury Man is more than a bit shameless in this aspect. the Big Bad is an Afghan terrorist named Osama bin Ali (though he sounds and looks Thai) and his evil plan is to blow up American military installments in Thailand with stolen weapons.

American Assassin, which is about Mitch Rapp having a personal vendetta against terrorists after his girlfriend is killed in a terrorist attack.

The Sicario Franchise, while dealing primarily with the United States' War on Drugs, sits firmly in this category. In the first film, the CIA agents respond to the Cartels' operations in Arizona as if they were stamping out an insurgency in the Middle East. More specifically, the events of the sequel, Soldado, are directly triggered by Jihadists crossing the Mexican-American border to carry out bombings.

The 2012 Espionage thriller Zero Dark Thirty depicts the CIA's manhunt for the architect of the September 11th attacks, Osama bin Laden. The film averts the third category by showing that the search for bin Laden was anything but easy; the central protagonist never kills anyone herself and the agency is powerless to stop many attacks in the intervening years, even ones directed at their own.

In Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Jack Ryan joins the Marines not long after the 9/11 attacks. The movie is also about trying to prevent a terrorist attack on New York.

The 1998 film The Siege, released three years before 9/11, was about the FBI dealing with homegrown Islamic terrorists committing bombings throughout New York, starting with an MTA bus, then a Broadway theatre, a school, and the FBI New York office.

Cloverfield is this combined with a Kaiju movie. The monster's rampage through New York is explicitly designed to call to mind the 9/11 attacks and the state of emergency that New York was under at the time, starting with a collapsing skyscraper producing a dust cloud that rolls through the streets in a manner not unlike the famous shots of the dust from the collapsing World Trade Center rolling through Lower Manhattan.

Its predecessor, JAG, went right into full The War on Terror mode after 9/11 (naturally, seeing as the show was always just one big propaganda project to drum up support for the military). The main characters routinely traveled into hotspots like Afghanistan, Iraq and others where real-life Judge Advocate General personnel would never set foot.

Although never dealing with 9-11 specifically (although this is arguably justified by it being set in what is in many ways quite clearly an Alternate History; it's quite possible that the attacks simply never happened in that universe), The West Wing often dealt heavily and frequently with Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the seasons following 9-11; the episode "Isaac and Ishmael", a non-canon episode written, filmed and aired within three weeks of the attacks, dealt with Islamic terrorism, and a running plot in the third and fourth seasons dealt with the fall out from an attempt by a Qurac-sponsored terror group to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge.

Law Procedural shows had episodes that followed the second example. The 2001-2002 seasons of The Practice, Judging Amy and Family Law all had episodes where an Arab or Persian character is picked up by the FBI or Homeland Security, and the lawyers are stymied by "classified information" in trying to understand what their client did and how to defend them. These showed fears of civil liberties eroding in the "early days" of the War on Terror. Law & Order dove deep into the second type during the Fred Thompson years, occasionally veering into Type 3. Episodes often touched on 9/11's effect on the country and New York City in particular, and often used the War on Terror to generate Jurisdiction Friction (With the feds interfering with - or outright hijacking - cases in order to further anti-terrorist goals).

Farscape. When John Crichton finally gets back to Earth he asks why his previously open-minded and egalitarian father has such a paranoid and hardline attitude on sharing alien technology with other nations. His father replies simply, "September the 11th." Crichton, having seen a lot worse, isn't impressed with this view.

Rescue Me is interesting in that while 9/11 is incredibly important to the series, it hardly ever touches on the idea of terrorism. Rather, it focuses on 9/11's effects on firefighters and their families (in particular, turning a large number of them into alcoholicShell Shocked Veterans.). In later seasons, they purposefully split the fanbase by having star character Franco Rivera "come out" as a a Firefighter For 9/11 Truth who points out how various policy-makers spoke of a "new Pearl Harbor" as the first step toward an American-dominated world. These views are shared by his actor, Daniel Sunjata.

The Sopranos also deals with the post 9/11 environment in an interesting way. It started by doing the standard thing: removing the Twin Towers from the intro montage of Tony driving from New York to his home in suburban New Jersey. But then it starts to realistically discuss the effects it would have on Tony's world, as Dwight Harris, the FBI Agent that had chased him for several seasons, is re-assigned to Anti-Terrorism. Tony then spends the remainder of the series trying to cultivate a relationship with him in order to trade info about potential terrorists (the only snitching his colleagues will tolerate) for leniency in the ongoing investigations into his syndicate.

The FBI as shown on The Wire has shifted its priorities away from drug crime, leaving the overmatched Baltimore PD to handle it alone. In fact, the only way they can get Federal help in most seasons is to baldly lie to the Feds to tie their investigation to a Terror case. Interestingly enough, the writers actually predicted that the real FBI would do the exact same thing, since the pilot was written months in advance of the FBI's move towards dealing mostly with terrorism.

Mentioned briefly in the first few episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah and John jumped from the nineties to present day, thus completely skipping over the 9/11 attack. Sarah goes to get a new identity forged, and she is told it will be harder after the attack. She speculates that if she hadn't time jumped straight through it, that she would've thought it'd be the end.

Standoff brings us the episode "Man of Steele", where the eponymous radio shock jock has a man on the line who takes a woman hostage. When Emily tries to reason that the FBI is trying to find the woman who scammed him Steele scoff, "Yeah right, the FBI couldn't find 19 known terrorists with box cutters." This quote is later seen on Lia's computer, who recorded Steele for when the FBI would step in to take him off the air, labelled 'September 12'.

Blue Heelers mentions this trope in passing, from fear Muslims are terrorists in light of 9/11 to Osama bin Laden being used to score political points in a town election to an episode revolving around Afghanis on the run: subverted when it had to do with them being asylum seekers.

Largely averted on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she missed the attacks, but "Help" had counselor!Buffy...help a boy who feared his brother joining the Marines. Afghanistan was a battlefield and Iraq was about to become one, and Buffy reassures him it's not stupid to be scared of what might happen like he thought it was.

Spooks spent its first, pre-9/11, series focusing on MI5 dealing with internal threats. Subsequent series focus more (but not exclusively) on international threats and islamic terrorism, until series 5, when it becomes a Conspiracy Thriller.

Designated Survivor is, essentially, 9/11 but with Capitol Building being bombed,note and some speculation goes that United Airlines Flight 93 was meant to hit the Capitol had it not been for the passengers' revolt forcing a woefully unprepared incumbent to take the reigns. The high tensions and emotions lead to Muslims being targeted because it was the Taliban and Al Qaeda last time and the threat of Islamic State, with the likes of Bin Laden and the immediate reaction name dropped. It even has a reenactment of the President (ironically Jack Bauer as a liberal against war hungry conservatives) being pressured to commit to swift brutal retaliation, even possibly a nuclear strike.

Home Land can absolutely be renamed, American Foreign Policy in a Post 9/11 World: The Series. From Carrie's obsession being because she did not stop the New York and Washington attacks to drone strikes in Al Qaeda and ISIS to 4chan social media cyber war against foreign and domestic terror.

Becker: The penultimate episode has John help a old lady get to Manhattan and when they arrive she can't go. Actually she begins telling a story about her son, with Becker quickly catching on even before the references to September and the view from his office spell it out.

Person of Interest is very much a product of the post-9/11 world. Reese and Carter are both veterans of The War on Terror. Finch started working on The Machine the day after 9/11, with the primary purpose of identifying future potential threats to the country.

The Punisher (2017): Frank Castle and Billy Russo served in a Marine Corps black ops unit in Afghanistan that was secretly smuggling heroin back to the United States inside the corpses of KIAs. The second episode of season 1 sees Dinah Madani having a conversation with her partner while walking around the reflecting pools at the 9/11 Memorial, even namedropping the attacks and peoples' resilience to bounce back after such major losses.

The show is set in Hell's Kitchen, which in season 1 is slowly rebuilding from "The Incident", which anyone who's seen The Avengers know was when aliens came out of a wormhole in the sky and wreaked havoc on Manhattan. Wilson Fisk is also exploiting the destruction by bid rigging on construction contracts.

After Fisk's bombing of Hell's Kitchen to eliminate the Russians, which he paints in the press to look like the work of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, Foggy likens the guy to Al-Qaeda (something Matt, being the eponymous masked man, takes offense to).

Foggy Nelson: Please tell me I don't detect a hint of admiration for that terrorist. Karen Page: This is just all speculation. Nobody knows if he's a terrorist or what. Foggy Nelson: You're absolutely right. Terrorists have causes. They claim responsibility. Al-Qaeda wanted the world to know exactly what kind of assholes they were. This guy? Not a peep. All terror without the "-ist." You know what they call that? Nut job.

Jessica Jones (2015) establishes that some people have developed prejudices against powered people in light of the Incident, and they are meant to be analogous to the sort of treatment people of Middle Eastern descent got after 9/11. At one point, a woman who lost her mother in the Incident even tries to kill Jessica just because she's enhanced, while in the season 3 finale, after going rogue and killing three criminals, Trish gets thrown in the Raft, AKA Superpower Gitmo, just because she's enhanced.

The NYPD uniforms have a party salad of decorations on a plate that also includes their badge, and the most prominent decoration is the one awarded to 9/11 first responders, a simple black bar with the letters "WTC".

"The Job" is about one of Frank's colleagues dying from 9/11-related illness.

In season 6, a police officer named Thomas Scully is up for promotion to Sergeant. However Frank has reservations about the promotion because Scully was one of four officers tried and acquitted 14 years earlier for the death of an unarmed Muslim teen who was shot sixty-one times in a dark apartment. Such a promotion could be bad as far as public relations are concerned, given the current climate. Frank talks with Jamie, who says that Scully was one of his instructors at the Academy. When he brought up the shooting, he said that at the time, his precinct was on edge, given it was just after 9/11, there was a tip that someone of Arab ethnicity was stockpiling weaponry, and a cop in their precinct had been shot in a housing project just days before the incident. This caused a perfect storm of circumstances that caused them to gun down this teen who reached for his wallet. note The entire incident is based on the Amadou Diallo shooting incident of 1999

Frank was a 9/11 first responder and saw the towers go down; he suffers from survivor's guilt as a result. He also has a peeve about people exploiting the tragedy to further their careers. His oldest son Danny was a Marine who fought in Fallujah.

In one early season 1 episode, the NYPD is put on high alert for a bomb threat by homegrown Islamic terrorists.

In "Hall of Mirrors" an undercover cop who infiltrated a terrorist cell is shot in a drive-by. It turns out to have not been related at all to the cell infiltration but to a love triangle.

In "Moonlighting", Frank broods over a quote from Donald Rumsfeld regarding the Iraq War ("the known unknowns").

In "Friends in Need," Frank acknowledges the issues that come up with intelligence gathering while hosting a number of top British police officials, bringing up the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks in doing so.

Video Games

A related trend during the 2000s was the Post-9/11 Military Game, which had you playing as a Western soldier or operative fighting terrorists in the Middle East or in other global hot zones. The First-Person Shooter genre especially was dominated by such games, with the more science fiction-inspired settings popular in The '90s falling by the wayside outside of a few standard-bearing franchises. At the genre's peak, they were often compared, by both their fans and their critics, to the gung-ho, Patriotic Fervor-driven war movies that Hollywood made during and after World War II.

Command & Conquer: Generals was one of the first games in this vein to come out. Notably, it provided a (canonical!) campaign for the terrorist faction, the Global Liberation Army, together with those of the American and Chinese heroes. Also of note is how, despite coming out in 2003, the game wound up being scarily prescient of the rise of the Islamic State a decade later, with many of their tactics being mirrored in the GLA.

Army of Two goes for the third. One cutscene is for 9/11 and a lot of the game has you fighting al-Qaeda, who are even mentioned by name.

The 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor, and its 2012 sequel Warfighter, attempted to do a straightforward, realistic shooter take on The War on Terror, much as previous games had done with World War II, without the embellishments that Modern Warfare had brought with it.

BlackSite: Area 51 combined the post-9/11 military game with the sort of sci-fi shooters that the genre had displaced. Much of the story was a satire of the militarism of the US after 9/11, with the armed forces overstretched by multiple wars and turning to the Reborn program, its ranks taken from convicts, the homeless, illegal aliens, and soldiers without families, in order to have enough soldiers to fight its wars without having to bring back conscription (and thus infuriate voters and destroy support for the war effort). The first level also took place in Iraq.

After 9/11, G.I. Joe merchandise and programs took the "terrorist" out of Cobra's description as a "ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world."

One of the first long-running storylines in Nip and Tuck involves Nip Todd getting the role as the lead for an action film inspired by The War on Terror. The director's original script is distinctly anti-military, revolving around a crooked politician hoping to frame an innocent Muslim community for acts of terrorism (with bioweapons!) to further drum up support for The War on Terror, only to be stopped by an INS agent who learns of the plan and goes rogue to stop it. As Nip himself firmly supports The War on Terror, and the rest of the actors turn out to be fellow Conservatives all blacklisted from the Screen Actor's Guild for their political views, they make a plan to secretly reshoot the movie as pro-military instead. Outing the director for his planned version, they make so much off of the movie that they go on to found their own indy movie company.

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